Evaluation Q7

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final product?

When I filmed my preliminary task, it was simply to learn about the basic camera skills and shots that are necessary in making a film look professional. The briefing for our prelim included the basic shots such as shot/reverse shot, match on action and 180 degree rule, also as a chance to show mid shots, long shots and close ups. This gave me the opportunity to learn how to use the basic editing of Final Cut Pro and so therefore I learnt how to fluidly cut together the match on action and shot reverse shot angles. When we created our short film, ‘The Package’, I became much more comfortable with creating more interesting shots other than the ones we focused on in my prelim. It also allowed me to become much more confident in editing and creating fluid shots, especially when linking two different locations (for example when Bea goes through the door into the classroom) to make them look smooth and as if they are the same location which was useful as we needed this for our real film in shots of the Southbank Centre.

         However, when I filmed my preliminary task and ‘The Package’ there was little planning involved and so most of it was made up on the spot. To make sure our thriller sequence worked well and the narrative made sense, we created shot lists, storyboards and shooting schedules to keep us on track and clear on what we needed in the opening. We also created a video of our storyboard cut together to give us an idea of what the final product would look like. This really helped us in later stages because when we were editing the shots together we could see what our initial ideas were and could replicate these. It also helped as it taught me how to use still images to create a fluid video which was extremely helpful in later stages when creating our ident.

When looking through our shotlist, I initially felt quite nervous with some of the locations that we had to film. First we ran a recce in Southbank to make it exactly clear which locations we would use and to keep track of our ideas. In our recce we faced a couple of problems that would’ve come up in the real filming had we not tested it first. For example, when filming in the tunnel, we realized it looked extremely dark on the camera so we tested different distances of light and agreed that we would need to use a light tripod and a hand-held light to make it light enough on the camera. This recce also made me feel much more confident with the equipment as we could test it all out in the surroundings. Since we had problems with reflections in glass and windows in ‘The Package’ we decided to test out different ways of filming inside the car for the scenes where Ally and Jasper were driving to court. Since we found it impossible to keep the camera completely still while the car was moving, we decided to use the movement to our advantage as to make it look obvious that the camera should not be straight.

This similarly happened later in our editing when we came across some quite bumpy and blurry footage of Ally running. Since we couldn’t completely make the shot clear, we reversed this idea, making the shot look purposefully blurry. I learnt that it was much better to make the shots look purposefully out of focus or bumpy rather than ignore it and try to make it look normal instead.

When we actually came to filming, I felt prepared and confident with the schedule and equipment. After planning driving routes and specific locations, filming was extremely quick and simple as we knew exactly what we had to do. As we had such clear ideas of what it was expected to look like and how the shots would work with each other, we could try out different angles and shots for each scene on set to see if it may look better. I felt I had learnt a lot over the preparation and preliminary task so that I could work out which shots would be most effective and we ended up changing a lot of our initial plans. For example, we used a tracking shot in the flashback instead of straight, fixed angles which meant that we varied a lot of our shots and it looked more stressful and panicked which was the look we were going for.

Since we were planning for the majority of the sound of the sequence to be piano music, we didn’t much take into account the sound when we were filming which caused lots of problems for us later on in editing. However, after learning how to adapt tracks from iTunes on Final Cut Pro in ‘The Package’, I felt confident enough to add in pre-recorded sounds over the top of the footage. I also felt throughout the editing process I learnt a lot more about transitions and colouring of shots and how they could work in relation to the rest of the film. This meant I was a lot more confident and used a number of different transitions and colour filters like in the flashback sequence.

Overall, apart from improving my editing and camera skills I learnt the importance of planning before filming. By planning locations, times, costumes and call times for actors, filming ran extremely smoothly meaning that it was easier for us to edit when we had a range of successful camera footage to use.